1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for display control of an object, and more particularly, to an apparatus and a method for displaying actual height information of an object on a surrounding image of a vehicle acquired through a camera.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, technology has been incorporated into vehicles that allows an image, or images, of a vehicles surroundings to be captured and visualized on a display in the vehicle, which allows the driver to easily assess relevant situations (e.g., the presence of animals, people, objects, etc.) within the vicinity of the vehicle. For example, the technology may obtain images (e.g., photographs) from all sides of the vehicle, and convert the images into top view images by synthesizing the respective images obtained from all sides of the vehicle. The synthesized image may then be provided to the user, so that the user may confirm the images of all sides of the vehicle at one time. Unfortunately, a significant disadvantage of such conventional technology is that it does not allow the user to assess the actual height of an object displayed in the image, which may result in the vehicle crashing into an object.
To address this issue, recent technologies have attempted to provide height information to the user by calculating the height of the object. For example, one such technology is based on extracting a contour line from an object assumed to be an obstacle from images acquired by two cameras installed at different angles, and then calculating vertical positions of the top and the bottom of the extracted contour line to calculate a distance to the obstacle and a height of the obstacle. Unfortunately, a significant disadvantage of this technology is that it requires the presence of at least two cameras that are installed at different angles in order to calculate the height of the obstacle. In other words, there is a problem in that the above-mentioned technology may not be applied to a vehicle in which only one camera is installed. In addition, since the two images are compared with each other to calculate the height of the obstacle, height calculation errors may occur as a result of errors and/or discrepancies in the individual images.